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Thursday, September 20, 2012

Day 4: Animating Character Hit

Day 4 was all about how to animate a character hitting into a wall. Start off with a clean sheet of acme paper and draw a line horizontally across the page with your blue animation pencil. Draw your wall on the far right of the page about an inch and a half away from the edge. Next you will use tick marks to scale where to draw 6 character images. The first 5 Characters will look exactly the same while the 6th character will be squashed to the wall like below. Draw the characters with your Carmine Red Animation Pencil. Try to keep the first 5 characters one directly in front of the other with the stomach of the character on the blue horizontal line. Imagine the head of the character is a ball, When drawing the 6th version of the character squashed to the wall, make sure the heads are alined as well. Do not move the character higher or lower than its head's landing point.

Taken from The Animator's Survival Kit By Richard Williams PDF pg. 99

For a stronger hit, you will have to draw the character exactly the same for all 6 spots and then draw the character hitting into the wall as a 7th image, like so:

Taken from The Animator's Survival Kit By Richard Williams PDF pg. 99

For an even stronger hit, you will have to draw the character exactly the same for 4 spots, and replace 5 and 6 as an elongated version of the character labeled as number 5. Then draw the character hit into the wall labeled as number 6, like so:

Taken from The Animator's Survival Kit By Richard Williams PDF pg. 99

Side Note: After the character hits into the wall the professor would like for us to draw an additional number/version of the hit. You can draw this in blue. The character's limbs are to point inward and you should label this as number 8. You can use my drawing below as reference.

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When you are finished with your drawings take a couple sheets of paper and begin drawing a cleaned up version of each one on a separate sheet of paper labeling each one accordingly, just as you did with the arrow project. Draw your background for your animation on a separate sheet of paper; make it unique but not too detailed. You could make the wall a pole in a street scene or a tree in the forest for example. Afterwards you are ready to film!

Side Note: Don't forget to draw the ears and tail on your character!

Here is the full page from The Animator's Survival Kit By Richard Williams you can use as reference.